Gina Kolata's front-page story on a potential cancer cure caused a frenzy
this spring--but the news was old and a cure far away.

by Abigail Pogrebin

On May 3, cancer patients across the country woke up to a seeming
miracle. The New York Times, not known for jumping to hasty conclusions
or overblown pronouncements, was trumpeting on its front page (and above
the fold) that a promising cancer cure was within reach, from the lab of
Boston scientist Dr. Judah Folkman. The reporter was Gina Kolata, the Times's
noted science writer of 11 years. It was tremendous news except for one
problem: It wasn't news. Folkman's research had been reported by another
Times science writer six months earlier, to no hoopla and with much less
prominence.

Kolata did get the science right. Folkman had been working for
more than 30 years to prove his hunch that two proteins, angiostatin and
endostatin, can eradicate cancer in mice by cutting off a tumor's blood
supply, without drug resistance or side effects. And Kolata made it clear
that the drugs had been successful thus far only in rodents. But that caveat
was lost amid the article's optimism and its placement.

The story's splashy play in the Sunday Times sent the world's
media into apoplexy. It was picked up by virtually every U.S. news outlet
and reverberated abroad under headlines like "Cancer Cure." Cancer patients
flooded hospital lines begging to be part of the drug trials. Memorial
Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center's president, Dr. Paul Marks, recalls the
fever. "We had to increase the number of personnel taking the calls because
we felt we had to deal with their anxiety," he says of the hopeful patients.
"My sense was that it was not a responsible article. It definitely wasn't
news. Not to the scientific community."

That didn't stop the drug maker's stock price from exploding.
Shares in EntreMed Inc., a small pharmaceutical company that funds Folkman's
research and owns the license to market any treatment he develops, rose
308 percent the next day, surging from $12 to $51, with 23 million shares
traded.

Almost as quickly as the frenzy began, so did the backpedaling.
Kolata's subjects publicly disputed the quotes she had used in her story.
Nobel Prize winner Dr. James Watson, codiscoverer of the DNA double helix,
had offered the article's showstopper: "Judah [Folkman] is going to cure
cancer in two years." The hitch? Watson maintains he never said it. "When
I read her article, I was horrified, because it said something I didn't
believe," says Watson. The Times published his letter to that effect. "My
recollection of the conversation, however, is quite different," wrote Watson,
who says he chatted with Kolata at a "lighthearted" dinner party six weeks
before her article appeared. He says she did not take notes or call him
afterward to confirm his comment. Watson adds that after his letter appeared,
he heard from many colleagues claiming they had been similarly misquoted
by her.

Kolata, who would only answer questions in writing, says "I don't
wish to be in the position of quarreling with a respected source and authority.
As I've said before, I am confident in the accuracy of my story, and I'm
glad we were able to let Dr. Watson further explain his view in a letter
to the editor."

Dr. Richard Klausner, director of the National Cancer Institute,
had been quoted by Kolata as calling Folkman's drugs "the single most exciting
thing on the horizon. I am putting nothing on higher priority than getting
this into clinical trials." Four days later, the NCI issued a press release
clarifying that "this research is by no means the only promising research
currently under way. There is no one 'top priority' of the NCI." The institute
also contested the story's news value: "Was there new information in the
news article? No."

Even Folkman was perplexed by the frenzy. "I'm puzzled by the
response, because this is five months old," he told The New Yorker. And
he stressed that the drugs he is developing are years away from being tested
in humans.

As cancer experts and science reporters questioned why an old
story was suddenly front-page news, the Times stood by its placement. "I
don't think there was any question that the story was a page-one story,"
says science editor Cornelia Dean. She says the article was never intended
to focus on Folkman's research, which she concedes had been covered earlier
by reporter Nicholas Wade. It was, explains Dean, an article about the
growing excitement over Folkman's research: "Gina was at a science meeting
on another subject, and she started hearing a buzz among scientists about
Judah Folkman and his work.... Her story was about the burst of optimism
and enthusiasm as they learned about this work."

Dean points out that Times editors actually held the story for
a week precisely because they feared the significance of the research would
be overblown. "We were trying very hard to make sure that while these results
are very exciting they are results in mice, not people," says Dean. "We
held the story because we thought maybe we have not done this adequately....
The fact that there was such hoopla over it shows that on some level we
did not succeed."

"I have to say, the reaction to the story was startling," Times
executive editor Joseph Lelyveld told The New York Observer. "Were we to
do it over again, I think we still would have put it on the front page.
But the caveats which were in the story probably would have been more forceful
and marshaled higher."

Kolata agrees. "If we could have foreseen the reaction the story
received from Wall Street and the media," she writes, "we would have underscored
[the caveats] even further. In the future, we will work doubly hard to
keep people from finding inappropriate meanings between the lines."

And what about the cancer patients who found those "inappropriate
meanings" and became convinced Folkman was a messiah? Dean says the Times's
power to inspire false hope cannot sway its news judgment. "Somebody said
to me, 'Cancer patients can't take this; they're not strong enough emotionally
to take this news.' If we start putting into the calculation 'Are the readers
strong enough emotionally?' I think that's a dangerous path to travel down....
There were people who said, 'You should never have run that story.' I disagree."